tdebase/doc/kcontrol/helpindex/index.docbook

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<authorgroup>
<author>&Mike.McBride; &Mike.McBride.mail;</author>
<author>&Jost.Schenck; &Jost.Schenck.mail;</author>

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</authorgroup>

<date>2002-10-17</date>
<releaseinfo>3.1</releaseinfo>

<keywordset>
<keyword>KDE</keyword>
<keyword>KControl</keyword>
<keyword>Help Index</keyword>
<keyword>Index</keyword>
</keywordset>
</articleinfo>

<sect1 id="help-index">

<title>Help Index</title>

<note><para>At the time of writing, for most installations of &kde; the entire search engine function in &khelpcenter; is disabled, and settings made in this &kcontrol; module will have no effect.  We hope to have it back in a future release.</para></note>

<para>&kde; comes with a lot of documentation for applications and
components. While it is possible to just browse the manuals until you
find that piece of information you're looking for, this may be a very
time-consuming task. To make this easier for you, &kde; offers
fulltext search using a program called
<application>ht://dig</application>. It works quite similar to search
engines on the web, in fact some search engines you know might even use
it. Just click on the <guilabel>Search</guilabel> tab in the
&khelpcenter;, enter the word you are looking for, click
<guibutton>Search</guibutton> and enjoy!</para>

<para>However, to make use of this feature,
<application>ht://dig</application> has to be installed on your system
and &kde; has to be configured to make use of it. This control module
tries to help you doing the latter. If you haven't installed
<application>ht://dig</application> and it wasn't shipped with your
operating system you have to get ht://dig yourself. Have a look at
<ulink url="http://www.htdig.org">the ht://dig homepage</ulink> on how
to download and install it.</para>

<para>When you first start, you are in display mode only.  To modify
your settings, click on <guibutton>Administrator Mode</guibutton>.  If
you are logged in as <systemitem class="username">root</systemitem>,
you will go straight to the change dialog.  If not, &kde; will ask for
a superuser password.</para>
<sect2 id="help-index-use"> 

<title>Use</title> 

<para>There are two important things to tell &kde; so it can make use of the
fulltext search engine:</para>

<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>where to find the <application>ht://dig</application> programs
KDE uses for fulltext search</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>where to search</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>

<sect3 id="help-index-use-progs">

<title>The <application>ht://dig</application> Programs</title>

<para> There are three programs &kde; needs that come with
<application>ht://dig</application>: <command>htdig</command>,
<command>htsearch</command> and <command>htmerge</command>. For each program you
have to provide the full path including the program name, for example: <filename
class="directory">/usr/bin/htdig</filename>.</para> 

<para>Where exactly these programs are installed depends on your operating
system or your distribution. However, there are some good guesses you might want
to try:</para>

<itemizedlist>

<listitem><para><command>htdig</command> and <command>htmerge</command> are
often found in <filename class="directory">/usr/bin/</filename> or in something
like <filename
class="directory">/usr/local/www/htdig/bin/</filename>.</para></listitem>

<listitem><para>the <command>htsearch</command> command is often found in a sub
folder called <filename class="directory">cgi-bin</filename>, for example
<filename class="directory">/usr/local/httpd/cgi-bin/</filename>.</para>

</listitem>
</itemizedlist>

<tip><para>To find out where for example <command>htdig</command> is installed
you can always type <command>whereis htdig</command> on the
console. <command>whereis</command> will look for the specified command in the
standard execution path folders. However, folders like <filename
class="directory">cgi-bin</filename> are often not in the standard execution
path.</para></tip>

</sect3>

<sect3 id="help-index-use-scope">
<title>Scope and Search Paths</title>

<para>In this section you can choose which help resources should be indexed,
&ie; made available to the search engine.</para>

<para>In the <guilabel>Scope</guilabel> frame you can select some
typical resources you want to be indexed, &ie; the &kde; help files,
and the information offered by the <command>man</command> and
<command>info</command> commands. Note that some of those may still be
disabled, which means that support for them has not been added
yet.</para>

<para>Maybe you have additional files you want to access using the
&khelpcenter; fulltext search feature. For example, you might have an
<acronym>HTML</acronym> reference installed in
<filename>/home/jdoe/docs/selfhtml</filename>.  By adding this path to
the list of additional search paths you make this documentation
available to &khelpcenter;'s fulltext search, too. Just click on the
<guibutton>Add</guibutton> button and a file dialog will ask you for
an additional search folder. Select
<filename class="directory">/home/jdoe/docs/selfhtml</filename> and click
<guibutton>OK</guibutton>. To remove an additional search path, just
select it and click <guibutton>Delete</guibutton>.</para>

<important><para>Your changes to the scope and additional search paths
will not take effect if you don't click on the <guibutton>Generate
index</guibutton> button.</para></important>
</sect3>

</sect2>

</sect1>
</article>